There’s a widening conversation about freedom of expression, sometime private and sometimes public, sometimes heated and sometimes calm, sparked by events at the University of Toronto, Wilfred Laurier, Dalhousie, and right here at UBC.

I have an unorganized opinion and I’m struggling to express that opinion in a way that satisfies me – a way that’s free from my unconscious biases, that respects people and principles, and that I can defend with reliable evidence.

Over the past few months, three people’s words and ideas refuse to fade from my memory. I take this as a sign that they’re informing my opinion, even if I don’t know how.

Aftab Erfan is the Director of Dialogue & Conflict Engagement in the Equity and Inclusion Office at UBC Vancouver. “Conflict,” she says, “is difference that matters” and “some conflicts will not be resolved.” Like the conflict between freedom of speech and a respectful environment. The University supports and promotes both of these.

Robert Talbert is a math professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. I follow his active learning research and practices and greatly admire his respect and care for students. He recently tweeted

Profs: Your job is not to protect students from intellectual difficulty. Your job is to make sure they encounter it – and give them a safe space to do so.

Yes, I totally agree, and help them learn and practice the skills to contribute to those difficult discussions.

I’ve known Mark Mac Lean, Professor of Teaching in Math at UBC Vancouver, for a long time – we were in grad school together. I’ve always seen Mark as a dedicated educator. His recent thread, “Free Speech and the Classroom,” caught my attention because of its deep respect and care for students. Mark writes

As a teacher, I need to be a self-governing person who understands that my actions in a classroom impact my students. I need to recognize they can’t simply mute me or walk out of the room without consequences. I need to recognize the large power differential between me and them.

The choices I make are not simply about my freedom (academic or otherwise) but impinge on them and their freedoms. Standing on Main Mall on a soap box and speaking my mind is very different than standing in my classroom and speaking my mind.

On Main Mall [a busy, public space at UBC], my audience can challenge me without fear of reprisal or simply walk away. In my classroom, neither is possible, even when I work to make it a place where students could be comfortable challenging me.

In one space, I am exercising my free speech (and possibly my academic freedom) and in the other I have the potential to curtail the freedoms of my students if I do not understand my responsibilities to my students.

I want to have an opinion – I need to have an opinion – and it bothers me that I can’t find the words to properly express it. For now, I’ll continue to listen and read, formulate and test my opinions with colleagues and mentors, in person and online.

In the meantime, let’s hear it for self-reflection: apparently it takes time and a safe space to develop and express an opinion in a way that satisfies me – a way that’s free from my unconscious biases, that respects people and principles, and that I can defend with reliable evidence. Wait, are those the kinds of opinions we want our students to learn to formulate, in classes led by course instructors who feel welcome and supported by the Centre for Teaching and Learning? Maybe I’m closer to an opinion than I think…

Every learner needs to build new concepts into their own pre-existing knowledge. That’s the constructivist model for teaching and learning and ultimately, I believe, the rationale and justification for active learning. Like I said on Twitter a few weeks ago,

“Active learning” means *every* student has opps to practice expert-like behaviors, not just select few who raise hands or voices.

So what goes into that “prep” to support every students? Here’s my train of thought:

A guide for preparing students

For now, I want to focus on these steps:

To manufacture time for active learning and to create the guide for students, the instructor should look at the topics, section, ideas, learning outcomes — whatever unit of knowledge they’re using to plan the course — and decide which of these are easy enough the students can learn on their own, and which are challenging and need to be explored together in class. There should be clear distinctions between what students are responsible for, what will be covered together in class, and what won’t be covered. My friend, Robert Talbert, gives a nice description of using Bloom’s Taxonomy to classify his learning objectives and picking a cutoff between what students can do on their own and what they need to do together.

Here’s how I picture it, with students responsible for the blue topics, leaving the orange topics for class:

I have privilege of teaching a large group of UC San Diego graduate students and postdocs about teaching and learning. At the end of the course, each student backward-designs a 50- or 80-minute lesson with learning outcomes, assessment, and instructional strategies. They also select readings and other pre-class activities, including guidance for their students about how to prepare for class.

They’ve all done a great job recognizing students don’t need to read all of Chapter 3 and 4 in order to prepare for tomorrow’s class. But many wrote guidance like, “Read Chapter 3, paying attention to the notation and the differences between the 3 theories presented by the author.” Full disclosure: that’s how I suggested they write the guidance and and that’s how they did it. Only after listening to my own faulty advice 50 times did I realize there’s a problem:

To me, that kind of guidance looks like this:

Students are asked to learn a little about everything before class. In class, the instructor goes over everything in more detail. (Graphic: Peter Newbury CC-BY)

To prepare for class, the students learn a little about everything. Then in class, the instructor goes over each topic, expanding on what the student started to learn. And that can lead to problems:

students don’t know how much they have to learn about each topic – there is no definition of mastery — and so they don’t know if they’re ready for class

the instructor is probably asking students to learn conceptually-challenging concepts they’re not capable of learning on their own — that’s why they come to class!

if a student doesn’t do the pre-class readings, that’s okay, the instructor will go over most of it in class. In other words, why bother reading next time?

a student who does the pre-class readings may not see the value of that effort because the instructor went over it anyway. Again, why bother reading next time?

there’s a risk in the “clear distinction” version of guiding the students, too: if a student doesn’t do the pre-class reading, they will struggle in class because the instructor is assuming they have the required background knowledge.

How to you get them to do it?

If you’re going to ask your students to invest a considerable amount of work in the class, they need to know why. “Because I said so” isn’t sufficient. Here are two ways to get buy-in:

Show them it’s valuable by letting them use their new knowledge and skills in class. If a student prepares for class and gets to, or better yet, has to, contribute to their and their classmates’ learning, they’ll do it again next time. And similarly, if they didn’t need to prepare, because the content wasn’t used or because the instructor went over it anyway, they’ll think twice about preparing for the next class.

Along with the pre-class guidance, instructors should plan for a pre-class reading quiz. The quiz questions assess students’ mastery of the (blue) topics they’re responsible for learning. A student who follows the guidance should have no trouble getting 100% on the quiz and a few percentage points toward their grade. Bonus: the instructor can check the students’ success on the reading quiz to ensure they’re prepared for class (or plan to cover a topic that was shown to be too difficult for students to learn on their own.)

Guided Practice and Preparation

Robert Talbert wrote an excellent description of the guided practice he gives his students before each class. I’ll leave the last word about supporting in-class, active learning to my friend, Beth Simon. She’s infectiously enthusiastic about flipping her class in order to create an engaging and rich learning experience when she and her students meet face-to-face.